Set Aside at Nine in the Evening

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as ever. Your century today, and the subject is a contest you were removed from before it started, without anybody meaning you any harm.

Two firms are weighed on the same night,
Both good, both fair, both doing right.
One's judged the best by any test,
One's merely fine, but passes best.
The better firm was never picked.
Not beaten, though. So how? And when?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two firms in the same trade, and the work, all together now, was equally good, though if you had put them side by side and examined them properly the first was rather better.

He had spent fifteen years becoming the best in the district, and he was. His finishing was finer, his experience deeper, and any customer who ended up with him got a better job than his rival's customers got.

The trouble was that nobody was examining anything properly.

A woman needing the work done did not sit down to compare the trade. She had twenty minutes and four names, and what she actually did was go through them looking for reasons to stop looking. No price anywhere, so she could not tell if he was in her range: put aside, not rejected, just set down. No photographs of finished work, so she could not picture it. An address that was not clear. A message sent on Tuesday and answered on Friday.

None of those is a fault in the work. Every one of them is a reason to move on when you have four names and twenty minutes, and she moved on without ever forming an opinion about his craftsmanship, which she never saw and never would.

She rang the second firm because nothing about it gave her a reason not to, and by half past nine she had stopped looking entirely, having found one that cleared the bar.

The second firm was not chosen for excellence. It was chosen for not being eliminated, which is a different achievement, and a cheaper one.

What that firm had done was dull and deliberate. A price range with an example. Six photographs of ordinary jobs, not showpieces. An address, a name, a face. Messages answered within the day, even when the answer was that she would reply properly on Thursday. Nothing there was impressive. Everything there removed a reason to stop.

And the finest craftsman in the district went on quietly assuming that the market rewarded lesser work, when what it had actually done was fail to reach his work at all.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

You are not being compared. You are being eliminated, and it only takes one missing thing. The picture most trades carry in their heads is of a customer weighing several suppliers carefully and choosing the strongest. What actually happens is that a busy person shortens a list as fast as they honourably can, and stops at the first one that seems safe enough. Excellence is what decides whether they are glad afterwards. It has almost nothing to do with whether they get as far as you.

So the useful audit is not what makes you better than your rivals. It is what causes a stranger to set you aside in the first ninety seconds, and the list is always the same dull handful: no price or range, no sight of the work, no plain address or name, no evidence anybody has used you, and slowness in replying. Each of those is invisible to you and decisive to her, and none of them is about your craft.

Which gives you an unusually cheap week's work, since these are not improvements to the business but the removal of obstacles from in front of it. The hidden price is the commonest of them, and the absent witness statement is the next, and both are solved with an afternoon rather than a year.

Then a harder thought, which is where the good craftsman gets caught. Being outstanding is largely wasted at the shortlisting stage and is entirely the point afterwards: it is what makes the customer stay, come back and tell people. So the sequence matters. Clear the bar first, then be excellent, since excellence sitting behind an unanswered message is a fine thing that nobody has ever seen.

Three questions, and do the first with somebody else's eyes:

1. Where would a stranger set you aside? Ask somebody who does not know your trade to try to hire you from scratch, in fifteen minutes, and to say aloud every moment they hesitate. It will be uncomfortable and it will be the most useful quarter of an hour of your year.
2. Which of the dull five are missing? Price or range, pictures of ordinary work, a name and address, evidence of other customers, an answer within a day. Mark the ones you cannot honestly tick, and fix them in that order.
3. How long does a first message wait? Count it in hours rather than days. A reply that merely says you will answer properly on Thursday keeps you on a list that closes on Tuesday night.

The Answer to the Riddle

How was the better firm never picked?

By being set aside, one small absence at a time, before any comparison began. He was not beaten by his rival, since the two of them were never held up against one another: he was removed from a list by a tired woman looking for a reason to stop, and the reasons she found had nothing to do with the thing he had spent fifteen years perfecting. She then chose the firm that gave her no reason to keep looking, and got a slightly worse job, and was perfectly happy with it.

The verse:

She did not weigh you and refuse,
Nor find your work below the rest.
She found one thing she could not use,
And set you down before the test.

Until next time. Go and have a stranger try to hire you in fifteen minutes, write down every hesitation, and remove the first three this week.

P.S. The reason this goes unnoticed for years is that elimination is silent. A customer who rejects you after a conversation may tell you why; a customer who set you aside at nine in the evening never made contact at all, so your evidence consists entirely of the people who got through, which is why so many good trades conclude that the market simply prefers cheaper work.

Also in the archive: The 9:47pm Enquiry, The Price Behind the Form and The Boy Minding the Shop.